Here's a practical example using Khan Academy's library and Wikipedia articles to teach about the scale of the Solar System with Popcorn.js: http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1309
The Popcorn library syncs events to a video's timeline. For example, I can show the profile, photo, and recent Tweets of each presenter/speaker in a video. And the plugins work with YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos. This was always possible in JavaScript, but Popcorn makes it simpler, putting interactive video into the hands of beginner programmers and small projects.
The documentary "One Millionth Tower" was uses popcorn.js to pull in realtime weather data, Flickr photos, Google Streetview maps while you are watching the video. All of it seamlessly integrating into the documentary. Here is the code for the documentary: https://github.com/m4robb/one-millionth-tower
plug I'm also working on a video annotating web app. I've followed popcorn.js for a while and was never happy with their direction. I've focused more on having users generate textual comments, timelined to the video. You can demo it at
when the app is more fully featured and less buggy I'll submit it to hackernews. If you are interested in following the progress, email me (dave@math.ucsb.edu). Thanks!
Cool stuff. Reminds me a bit of how http://soundcloud.com does a similar thing with music. Check it out if you haven't, yet. It's a really well done solution IMHO.
Thanks! I agree, Soundcloud does have a pretty slick implementation. I've definitely tried to learn from their design. Viddler also has a similar feature, and more related to online video. I think what popcorn.js and these other tools are trying to do is pretty exciting. There's still lots of room for improvement.
This is a great library for doing product demos. Instead of having a video where someone clicks around your app, just create a voice over and have it actually click the links, drag the items, submit forms, etc. Especially awesome if your app is heavy on javascript (like a GWT application)
27 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadPS: Popcorn looks really good!
There are a lot more examples on http://popcornjs.org
Using Mozilla's Popcorn Maker webapp, anybody can make a similar project: http://mozillapopcorn.org/popcorn-maker/
http://www.thevaldmans.com/quip
when the app is more fully featured and less buggy I'll submit it to hackernews. If you are interested in following the progress, email me (dave@math.ucsb.edu). Thanks!
Bad marketing imho.
Good to have. But for me not very practical. I think I have to rewatch the video to look at the comments/infos most of the time.